This invention relates to cookie or cake topping machines, and particularly to machines for both topping and layering baked objects so as to make sandwiches of them.
In my earlier U.S. Pat. No. 3,783,772 I disclosed a sandwich making machine which was operable to accept cookie or dough products from an oven and to form those cookie or dough products into a sandwich without the need for any intermediate manual handling of the cookies between the oven and the sandwich making machine. This invention is in the nature of an improvement upon the sandwich machine disclosed in the above identified U.S. Pat. No. 3,783,772.
The sandwich making machine disclosed in the above identified U.S. Pat. No. 3,783,772 is operable to receive columns of cookies or bakery products in irregularly spaced and misaligned rows and to automatically align those rows, apply topping to alternate ones of the rows, and layer the alternate untopped rows onto the topped rows. The machine comprises a reciprocating feeder bar operable upon detection of a predetermined weight of objects at the infeed station to push the objects forwardly onto a continuously moving endless belt conveyor. Simultaneously, with the actuation of the pusher bar a memory circuit is actuated to record the position of the objects on the conveyor. This memory circuit then controls the application of the topping to alternate rows of objects and subsequent pick-up, inversion and layering of untopped rows of objects onto topped rows.
It has been found that the use of a pusher bar operable upon detection of a predetermined weight of objects at the infeed station to initiate cycling of the machine and the use of a memory circuit actuated upon initiation of the movement of the pusher bar for controlling subsequent operation of the machine, is unnecessarily complex and expensive. It has therefore been one objective of this invention to provide an improved feed system for feeding bakery products into a sandwich machine without the need for manual labor to gently place the bakery products into a magazine, and without the need for a complex memory circuit to control operation of the machine.
This objective is accomplished by the feed machanism of this invention wherein the dough products are fed into a magazine from which the lowermost one of a stack of dough products are sequentially fed into the machine. If the products are particularly fragile or are to be coated with a product such as chocolate which requires chilling before the product may be handled, the products are passed through a cooling tunnel and rigidified before they are fed into the magazine. By passing the products through a cooling tunnel before they are stacked in the magazine, breakage or chipping of the dough products is minimized in the course of being fed into and from the magazine. Additionally, cooling the product to a temperature substantially below that of the room before the product is fed into the magazine has an additional benefit. The baked product will remain cool when it is fed through the sandwich machine. When the filling or topping material is applied to the lowermost cake or bakery product, regardless of the consistency of the filling material, the cap or topmost baked object may be placed on top of the unit and the unit compressed because the BTU content of the filling material is immediately absorbed into the refrigerated or cooled dough product as soon as the material is placed on the lowermost baked product. Consequently, the completed sandwich will withstand handling without the need for further cooling before it may be mechanically handled and packaged.
Additionally, the addition of the refrigerating or cooling tunnel upstream of the magazine has the advantage that it enables soft bakery products, such as oatmeal cookies, which could never heretofore be fed from a magazine, to be so fed into the machine.
Still another advantage of the use of a cooling tunnel upstream of the magazine of the sandwich machine is that it enables the sandwich product to be coated with chocolate or other types of coating with much greater facility. Prior to this invention it has been common practice to coat sandwich products with chocolate or other coatings and after coating to pass the coated product through a long cooling tunnel before the product could be mechanically handled. With the invention of this application the coated sandwich product is quickly chilled and set up because of the use of a chilled or cold bakery product to which the chocolate or coating material is applied.
Another problem with the sandwich machine disclosed in the above identified U.S. Pat. No. 3,783,772, upon which this invention is an improvement, is that of disposing of and cleaning up waste topping material which either misses a target bakery product when the topping material is dispensed onto a target product, or which is dispensed when there is no bakery product beneath the dispenser. In that event the topping material, which may be marshmallow or other similarly sticky material, falls onto the conveyor or onto the machine beneath the conveyor and become a clean-up problem.
It has therefore been another objective of this invention to facilitate clean-up of waste topping material which is ejected from the dispenser but which does not fall onto a target baked product. To that end the invention of this application incorporates a transverse waste topping belt movable in a path transverse to the direction of movement of bakery products through the sandwich machine and located beneath the topping dispenser. The main conveyor upon which the bakery products are conveyed past the dispenser comprises a pair of spaced belts operable to transport each column of bakery product. Beneath these spaced belts is the transversely extending continuously rotating waste topping belt conveyor. Any topping material which is dispensed from the topping dispenser and which misses a target bakery product, passes between these belts of the main conveyor onto the top of the transverse belt waste take-off conveyor and is transported to a waste topping material reservoir located at one end of the conveyor. At this one end there is a wiper operable to wipe the waste topping material from the belt and move it into the waste reservoir.
Still another problem encountered with the machine disclosed in the above identified U.S. Pat. No. 3,783,772 was that of maintaining alignment of the topmost cookie when it was placed upon the lower topped cookies to form the sandwich. In the prior art machine disclosed in this patent, a pusher plate pushed the upper or topmost row of objects off of a deadplate as the lower topped row moved beneath the deadplate. Alignment of the top and bottom cookies was dependent upon synchronization of the pusher plate with the movement of the conveyor so that the two rows were perfectly aligned when the top row was moved onto the top of the lower row. Occasionally, if the pusher plate was slightly out of synchronization with the movement of the conveyor, the top and bottom layers of the sandwich were misaligned.
It has therefore been another objective of this invention to improve the alignment of top and bottom layers of the sandwiches produced on the machine such that the tops always move off of a supporting deadplate and onto the lower bottom cookie when the tops and bottoms are vertically aligned. To that end the invention of this application utilizes a conveyorized pusher finger operative to simultaneously move the lowermost topped cookie or object forwardly on its supporting conveyor while pushing the topmost layer off of a deadplate. Thereby, the two layers of the sandwich are caused to be perfectly aligned when the top layer is pushed off of the deadplate onto the lower bottom layer.
Still another problem encountered with the machine disclosed in the above identified U.S. Pat. No. 3,783,772 was that of the sandwich being generally wedge-shaped--lower at the front and higher at the back--when it emerged from the machine disclosed in this patent. This prior art machine sized the completed sandwich by passing it beneath a sizing roller.
It has therefore been another objective of this invention to provide a sandwich machine in which the final product is sized such that the leading and trailing edges are of the same height rather than having the leading edge lower than the trailing edge. To that end the machine of this application incorporates a reciprocal presser plate operable to place a predetermined weight on the top of each sandwich before the sandwich leaves the machine and thereby to eliminate the wedge-shaped configuration characteristic of cookies made on the machine of the above identified patent.
Still another problem characteristic of the machine identified in the above identified U.S. Pat. No. 3,783,772 was that of an inability to stop the infeed of cookies or objects into the machine if it was desired to run the machine dry of product or to infeed alternate rows of cookies at start-up for filling of the upper layer conveyor of the machine.
It has therefore been another objective of this invention to provide a machine which is capable of either running the machine dry while preventing the infeed of cookies or capable of infeeding cookies to alternate rows sites on the infeed conveyor. To that end the invention of this application incorporates lifter fingers movable in synchronization with a pusher feed wheel to lift cookies in the feed magazines each time the bottommost cookie or product is removed from the magazine. If the feed is to be stopped momentarily, as for example to run the machine dry by feeding all of the products in the machine through without any further infeed, these fingers are operative to hold the cookies in the feed magazine in an upward position out of alignment with the pusher feed wheel so that they cannot be contacted and fed out of the magazine by the feed wheel.